Oh wow, this is great insight. Do you have any reccos as to which Graeber I should read? I just came off a job where I feel like my bosses prioritized my useless paperwork generation more than any value-added tasks that I did. Of course, that company is now pretty much near bankruptcy. If you asked me, I'd say it was because they valued the bureaucratic over anything innovative.

I've been reading Schumpeter again lately, and I think he would say something similar. Just a couple of quotes I just highlighted from his concept of the "death of the entrepreneur":

• The leading man no longer has the opportunity to fling himself into the fray. He is becoming just another office worker—and one who is not always difficult to replace.
• The perfectly bureaucratized giant industrial unit not only ousts the small or medium-sized firm and “expropriates” its owners, but in the end it also ousts the entrepreneur and expropriates the bourgeoisie as a class which in the process stands to lose not only its income but also what is infinitely more important, its function. The true pacemakers of socialism were not the intellectuals or agitators who preached it but the Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Rockefellers.

That last one is kind of nuts if you think about it. By emphasizing capitalism so much that we've become Kafkaesque, we actually are sowing the seeds of its destruction. This, in reality, might be exactly where we're at.